ISO/IEC  JTC1/SC22/WG15 (Posix) Meeting,  Stockholm,	Sweden
				November 1991


				Meeting Report


	0. Administrative Concerns:

	The  Plenary  ran from	5-November to  8-November-1991,  and was
	preceded on the 4-November by parallel meetings of the Security,
	Conformance and Internationalisation rapporteur groups.

	Twenty-nine  delegates	from Canada,  Denmark,	France, Germany,
	Holland, Japan, Sweden, the USA and the UK attended  all or part
	of the Plenary.


	1. Agenda:

	The  agenda  placed  thirty-two  action  items	and  some  sixty
	documents before the meeting for review or consideration.  As at
	previous  WG15 meetings,  the Plenary divided itself  into three
	sub-groups  for one full day in  order to  handle the work load.
	The sub-groups	were charged  with sublimating	their input into
	one or more of:
		. Disposition of comments (on drafts, NPs etc)
		. Resolutions for consideration by Plenary
		. Actions
		. Unresolved issues for consideration by Plenary
		. Report to Plenary and minutes for distribution.

	This level of activity led to a resolution to extend the Plenary
	into time reserved for the Rapporteur Groups at the beginning of
	the week for future meetings.

	The Plenary  produced a  further twenty three resolutions,  many
	related to requested liaisons  with SGFS,  SC22/WG13 (Modula-2),
	the SC22 ad-hoc  group on  interpretations  and  other	external
	groups, together with forty two action items.


	2. IEEE TCOS Report:

	The  US Head of Delegation  reported  that  "the floodgates were
	about to open from the IEEE Posix working groups to ISO": drafts
	of P1003.2a (User Portability Extension) and  P1003.6 (Security)
	are ready now to begin the ISO process, while P1003.4 (Real Time
	Extensions), P1003.8 (Transparent File Access) and the	Language
	Independent  Specification   to  P1003.1,   together   with  the
	corresponding 'thin' c binding, are available now for review and
	comment.

	In total ten drafts will become available in the next  year, and
	a further fifteen the next.  This represents a massive volume of
	paperwork  to  be  processed  by WG15,	SC22 and  the ISO member
	bodies.


	3. Liaisons:

	WG15  spent  some  time  considering  the  new	work  area being
	addressed by the SGFS group.  WG15 had requested a joint meeting
	of  its  Rapporteur  Group on  Profile	Coordination  Activities
	(RGCPA) with SGFS,  and this resulted in the meeting of the SGFS
	Authorised Sub-Group, 30-Oct to 1-Nov.	At least five members of
	WG15 attended  the SGFS Authorised Sub-Group meeting.  The RGCPA
	will meet in January to consider the SGFS papers and respond.

	WG15 resolved to pass the Posix profile  work to SGFS as a guide
	to adjustments needed in a revised TR 10000. The US was actioned
	to develop an outline Posix taxonomy for input to SGFS, together
	with comments on  the differences  between the SGFS profile work
	and the Posix Platform	Environment Profile (PEP).

	The WG15  Rapporteur  Group  on  Conformance  Testing (RGCT) has
	reservations  that  the   SGFS	timetable  is  not  sufficiently
	aggressive  to	allow  the  emergence  of Profile  work for some
	considerable  time.   WG15  welcomes  the  TR 10000 revision and
	recognises that it will impact Posix work:  the longer	the SGFS
	work takes the larger is the number of affected Posix standards.

	The WG15 Rapporteur Group on InternationalisatioN (RIN) believes
	that  National Profiles are ill-conceived in SGFS.   RIN will be
	offering  formal  input  to the  revision of  TR 10000 either by
	Technical Report or by other less formal means.

	Amongst other issues considered by WG15 was the JTC1 N1532 paper
	proposing an NP for a Generic Operating System Interface (GOSI),
	which would also involve future liaison commitments:  WG15 heard
	that Posix could be a platform under  GOSI.  SC22 has been given
	the task of responding to the JTC1 ballot comments on N1532, and
	WG15 drafted a resolution offering to draft the ballot responses.


	4. ISO 10646:

	Resolution AY from the SC22 Plenary in Vienna, in September 1991
	was  considered  by WG15's RIN.   SC22 Resolution AY  warns that
	any programming language or Operating System which relies on its
	strings being terminated by a NUL octet  (eg c and Posix) cannot
	make use of character encoding standards such as 10646 which use
	embedded NUL octets. RIN agreed that the acceptance of DIS 10646
	in  its  current  form would introduce	significant problems for
	implementations of the	ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 standard,  including
	severe limitations on backwards compatibility issues.

	WG15  resolved	therefore that:  'ISO/IEC  JTC1/SC22/WG15 Member
	Bodies	are  requested	to  take  these reasons  into account in
	establishing a ballot response to ISO/IEC DIS 10646'.


	5. Future Meetings and Travel Funding Support:

	The meeting closed at 15:15 on Friday, 8-November-1991. The next
	meeting is scheduled to take place at the University of Waikato,
	New Zealand, 4th to the 8th of May, 1992.

	Confirmation of intention  to attend this meeting is required by
	the  University of Waikato administration by the 4th of January,
	1992, and therefore potential delegates will need to confirm any
	travel funding support by the end of December 1991.


	6. UK delegation:

		David Cannon	(UK BSI IST/5/-/15 Convenor, HoD)
						(University of Exeter)
		Colin O'Driscoll	(Conformance Rapporteur)
						(NCC)
		Dominic Dunlop	(RIN Rapporteur)
						(University of Oxford)
		Don Folland	(RGCPA Rapporteur)
						(CCTA)
		Martin Kirk	(IEEE 1003.7 Chair)
						(X/Open UK Ltd)
		Kevin Murphy	(Security Rapporteur)
						(BT Security)


	Dave Cannon
	10-November-1991